This was my last day in Berlin so I planned to have an early start and do as much as I could. I wanted to reach the Reichstag at 8, just as it opened. Of course, as usual, things did not work out so I reached it half an hour late. Naturally, everyone else in the hostel was still asleep when I left - they sure have a lot of fun at night. Or maybe they have a lot of time to spend in each place, and realize that looking at attractions and museums bores them, being young funky people, and so they space everything out so they can get to the meat - clubbing.
Back of the Reichstag
There was already a queue at 8:30am, which reached partway down the steps. Gah.
View of the glass thing in the centre of the dome from the top
There were panels with information on German democracy in the dome. I found this interesting: "The Reichstag building never housed the sham parliament of the Third Reich". They were very proud of that. Hah!
View from the roof. You can see the Siegessäule and a tower erected to mark the city's 750th anniversary in the first and the huge Berlin Hauptbahnhof in the other.
West Germany had a "Disarmament and Defence Minister". Gah.
The roof
Dome
Glass thing from the bottom
At 9:37am when I was coming down the stairs the queue went down 2 flights of stairs onto the square.
Tiergarten. It's a park in the middle of Berlin. Not as big as Central Park, perhaps, but still huge.
Somewhere near the midpoint of June 17th Avenue, between the Siegessäule and Brandenburg Tor.
Siegessäule from the back
Siegessäule
Bismarck
Mosaics on the Siegessäule
View from the top
"NO GRAFFITI !! Keine Liebeserklärungen ! Keine autogramme !"
I don't read German, but I roughly got the idea of this. I can't transcribe and translate everything, but this part looked the most prominent so I got out my crystal ball: "NO GRAFFITI !! No declarations of love ! No autographs !"
"Photography is not a crime!"
Seen in the passage to Siegessäule. They meant to put it in the Checkpoint Charlie museum.
I then went to the Berliner Dom (Cathedral).
Berliner Dom
They had the temerity to claim that the ticket was a "donation for the preservation of the cathedral". What pissed me off even more was that they dared to sell me a ticket an hour before the midday prayer ended (ie I couldn't go in for another hour). Luckily I had time, so I went to the Egyptian museum first.
My Mastercard Maestro got rejected by the machine in the Berlin metro with the message 'Kartenlaton Falsch'. Wth. Luckily it accepted notes.
So far the only European city I've been to where I've gotten MRT-ed, whether on the bus, train or metro, is Athens. This shows that if you treat people like humans, some of them may behave like dogs but if you treat people like dogs, they will always remain dogs and will revert to their feral state once you lift the whip. [MRT-ed: The doors open and people rush in without letting you out, and shove and push.]
In Germany, soft drink bottles come with a 15 cent deposit that you get back when you return the bottle to vendors. This encourages recycling, but I have a feeling that it's more of a feel-good measure that, like many other feel-good gimmicks, causes more waste than it saves. The bottles have to be transported, sorted (and some condemned), have their paper wrappers removed, washed and sterilized before they can be used again. Furthermore, the bottles (for Coke at least) are thicker than in normal countries, thus needing more plastic to make.
I saw my biggest ever busking group on an S-bahn train - 2 trumpet players, 1 accordionist, 1 drummer, 1 man with a coin cup who was shaking it and 1 extra who was doing nothing. I wonder why busking is banned in Singapore in the first place - it's sure less annoying than TV Mobile and it costs the transport company zilch. Or maybe they want them to retrain to fry gao laak instead.